Jews in Nevada

The book is the first comprehensive documented study of Jews in Nevada from 1850 to the present. It details their involvement in the development and fostering of the state’s earliest settlements and its social and political institutions. Among the themes are: antisemitism, Jewish participation in civil rights initiatives, and the explosive growth of Jewry in the Las Vegas metropolitan area along with the development of an expanding Jewish cultural infrastructure. It includes victimized peddlers and modern millionaires, heroines and exploiters, underworld figures and philanthropists, as well as the religiously observant and secular.

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables

Preface

Nevada Jewish history has been so well hidden that even natives are unaware
of its presence. The present volume is an offering to both the Jewish and
general readership about this people’s place in the state’s development from
mining camps to a premier tourist destination.

Introduction Celebrating Tradition and Resisting Assimilation

Nevada Jewry would not have existed without millions of its ancestors maintaining
Judaism. Comprehending its history requires some understanding of
the milestones remembered for more than two millennia and the struggle for
acceptance in a Christian world. There were also the lures of accommodation
or assimilation, especially in the isolation of Nevada’s desert, where Torah ...

1. Peddlers and Merchants, 1850–1863

Small-time trading had been the lot of about 85 percent of Prussian Jews
in early-nineteenth-century Europe. Although many European countries
banned trade with non-Jews before emancipation, peddlers became an indispensable
link between isolated farmers and urban suppliers, often bartering
manufactured goods for agricultural products. Some engaged in brokering ...

2. From Territory to Statehood, 1861–1865

Whereas miners moved from one place to another, depending on their luck,
merchants had to decide whether to rent a firetrap or take a chance and build
in stone. Jewish entrepreneurs were as cagey as the next person, but attempting
to assess the most profitable location was a gamble, given the uncertainties
of mining. Impossible winters in Virginia City, the difficulty of bringing ...

As the Comstock’s ore production continued to giddy heights, the demand
for a rail connection to Reno and San Francisco overcame years of bickering
and competing proposals. Theodore Judah was the chief architect of the
Central Pacific Railroad’s route through the Sierra Nevada from Sacramento
east through the Donner Lake pass and across northern Nevada to Utah.1 The
project began in January 1863, ...

4. A Gunfighter, a Physician, an Alleged Arsonist, and a Reform
Congregation, 1865–1885

By western standards, Virginia City and Carson City were law-abiding places.
Pioche, however, was considered the wildest town in the West. Located
in southeastern Nevada, Pioche was slow to boom and with no need to be on
a railroad line. Mining discoveries drew more than five thousand treasure
seekers to the area by 1872, including a small but influential group of Jewish ...

5. Settling, Praying, Working, and Partying in the Halcyon Years,
1865–1880

All of Nevada’s towns and mining camps had a cosmopolitan international
population drawn to the United States by its economic opportunity.1 Jews
emigrating from Prussia and eastern Europe were also fleeing discriminatory
laws, military service, and pressures to assimilate. Once here, they
did not—like San Francisco Italians—wish eventually to return to the old ...

6. Women, Their Children, and Their Occupations, 1860–1900

Jews migrating to Nevada in its first twenty years were usually young bachelors
who tended to get married late in life and to considerably younger women.
Jewish men already married or engaged usually traveled alone to Nevada
and later brought their families to the state, if the prospects proved promising.
A few Jewish men and women never wed, and others married outside
the faith.

7. Coping with Depression, 1880–1910

When Frederick Jackson Turner announced in 1893 that the frontier had
ended three years earlier, Nevadans were not cooperating. Turner and the
director of the census, Harold Simonson, theorized that settled civilization
began and the frontier ended when the average population reached 2 persons
per square mile. Though an average 2.4 Nevadans per square mile had settled ...

8. Dashed Hopes, New Discoveries, and the Goldfield Bubble,
1890–1920

When the state’s economic prospects seemed so bleak, Ephraim Deinard of
the Hebrew Agricultural Society of the United States unveiled a plan to triple
Nevada’s population with thousands of East European Jews.1 In August 1897,
Governor Reinhold Sadler delegated Republican Theodore R. Hofer and entrepreneur
Morris Cohn (father of Felice) to take out an option on fifty-five ...

9. Building a Tourist Economy and a Permanent Synagogue,
1897–1946

Before and after the Goldfield excitement, a central issue facing Nevada was
diversifying its economy. Exploiting Nevada’s vast unsettled land agriculturally
required better management of water resources. Until then, other expedients
were necessary. Jewish state senator Herman Freudenthal introduced
the first substantive bill of the 1903 legislative session, calling for an appropriation ...

10. The Early Years of Las Vegas, 1905–1955

Las Vegas started as a watering stop on a trail—and later a railroad line—that
came and went to more important places. Neither born of a mineral bonanza
like so many Nevada towns nor the product of Benjamin Siegel’s alleged desert
vision, it had one of the state’s oldest recorded place-names. Its abundant
springs led to its being named “the Meadows” (Las Vegas) by travelers on the ...

11. Building a Temple, Keeping a Rabbi, and Schisms North and South,
1950–1980

At midcentury, Congregation Beth Sholom had a full-time rabbi, David Cohen,
cantor Herman Kinnory, and a Jewish Community Center it had outgrown.
Jake Kozloff, a former Pennsylvania brewer who had just purchased
the Last Frontier, was president of Beth Sholom when its members decided
to build a temple at Sixteenth Street and Oakey Boulevard. Kozloff’s restaurant
at the ...

12. Antisemitism in the Twentieth Century

Nineteenth-century Nevada Jews were largely untouched by overt acts of discrimination
or prejudice. This benign environment was due to Jewish civic
leadership, their economic contributions, the smallness of the Jewish population
itself, and the fact that Jews were just one ethnic minority in a state with
the highest percentage of foreign-born citizens. At the turn of the century, ...

13. Civil Rights and Uncommon Causes

“Both Jews and Blacks are a pariah people—a people who had to make and
remake themselves as outsiders on the margins of American society and culture.”
Black professor Cornel West thus introduced his 1995 dialogue with
Rabbi Michael Lerner on how to begin the healing of hostile relations between
the two—particularly in large East Coast cities.1 Jews moving to Nevada
from these areas carried memories of friction and camaraderie.

14. The Varieties of Religious Observance, 1974–2005

Few better represented the struggle to maintain a Jewish identity in rural
Nevada than Morris and Lina Badt. All their children were raised Orthodox
in San Francisco schools, spending summers and holidays in Elko. Milton
counted Hebrew among his several languages and abstained from pork but
never affiliated with a synagogue. All the Badt children promised their mother
to marry Jews.

15. Yiddishkeit, or Ways of Being Jewish, 1931–2005

“Kosher Las Vegas, nu?” This slippage into Yiddish is simply a preparation for
what is to come after a taste of traditional Jewish fare. Strictly kosher foods
are prepared according to ancient dietary regulations called “kashruth.” Meat
must come from an animal with split hooves that chews its cud. Fish that lack
fins or scales, such as shrimp and lobster, are forbidden, as are birds of prey.

16. Walking the Walk, 1970–2005

The characteristic of being “Jewish” might be observed in one’s organizational
affiliations, dress, or speech. However, Jewish values learned from childhood,
such as tzedakah and tikun olam, inform the social consciences of religious
adherents and those who have abandoned any external observance. These
are matters of remembrance and intention. No substantive documentary ...

Conclusion: The Past Need Not Be Prologue

When Isaac Cohn began his half-century residency in the shadow of the
Comstock in 1850, few could have imagined the extent to which his fellow
Jews would be instrumental in shaping Nevada’s economic, social, and
political landscape. They were among the first to arrive in Nevada’s many
isolated mining outposts. In those camps that became settled towns, Jews ...

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